Tony, that's sort of my understanding of the child portals when I was looking into it a couple years ago.

Regarding Active Social, and the change in the other Social Suites, in essence, that's exactly what happened. It didn't happen in a matter of minutes, but Vivo went open source directly and almost immediately as a result of Active being purchased by DNN - because they saw the writing on the wall (Vivo did still offer paid support, install and customization for a couple years off the open source product, however). (Keep in mind that initially DNN said they were going to offer almost all of Active's social feature in the community edition). According to info released at the time, the honchos of Vivo and Active were in communication around that time, and were peers/friendly. Prior to that it was a $500 tool, which I believe Active Social and maybe Smart were also fairly pricey - but had a lot to offer. Vivo was still developed (less and less) until 2012?, but I think their site went offline a bit before, which probably corresponds with DNN opening up some of the social features structure in the Community edition. Vivo actually operated under a different name 5+/-years ago, and has been around for quite a while with multiple employees/developers. I can't remember when Smart went open source, but I believe it predated the DNN purchase by a while, but was still maintained as Open Source for some time until Active and Vivo essentially were the two players (both having more mature and regularly updated products). In Rodney's (Smart's) case, I think it was man hours (doing support vs. $ vs. his own site) and competition that closed that down. (I think he was getting killed on the customer support, feature request, bug fix, etc. stuff due to the complexity of the product vs. competition vs. overall demand vs. price, and running a one man show).

It's my understanding that most of what Active Social was supposed to offer had to be rewritten from scratch by DNN, and it probably was a bad investment (except that indirectly due to the fall out/lack of DNN competition it makes Evoq more attractive & hiring Active's main man). I'm sure DNN used what they could for Evoq/Community (gamification, notifications?,profiles?, and the strategy of the design itself), but I believe it was pretty much a full rewrite due to statements released by DNN (or various "core" component teams). (I believe it was mostly due to how (complicated) the code was written as to why it needed to be largely redone, but I could be wrong as I don't know specifically what they did/did not use). DNN was pretty clear (initially) in their news that almost all of ActiveSocial features were going into the Community (there was quite a bit of uproar at the time both about the forums, licenses, fees, and social features). However, (I assume) due to it needing to be redone (and the question of integrating with existing "core" toys like blogs), that's why we don't see those other pieces at all now (yet). I don't know all of what Evoq offers (I've seen their feature list, but I don't know if it has group level tools I've mentioned), but Active Social did have some of those group and personal level features (personal, site, and group forum, journal, bookmarking, etc.).

I cannot say how many folks could use this setup, but this is a very common way of running social (groups). Prior to journals taking off via Facebook/Twitter for real time personal short term/immediate interaction, this was THE way of doing it (aka Yahoo). Someone recently referred me to one of the new DNN developer sites being run by a group of DNN employees/long time community members, and they use this exact groups format via DNN 7 Community edition (albeit toned down due to lack of tools). (BTW, coincidentally after the fact, this site I'm referring to has recently become project members in ongoing development of Active Forums).

Think of groups like clubs in the real world (though it can easily be a business or fan page such as the Pacific Northwest 49ers haters club, or various DNN user "clubs" by region or something). DNN program would provide the main site, and within the main site, end users could open many clubs in order to share common interests with other end users. Then each club has it's own set of limited tools/settings (events, announcements, forum, journal, etc.), with limited customization options. At the same time, the groups are still part of the main site (a difference from being a personal website or child portal). Yahoo (and AOL, Delphi, even Google etc.) made this extremely popular (with group level announcements, forums, etc.), but Facebook still uses it now. (Except facebook hasn't added the group level blogs, forums, etc. - as their focus is short term personal interaction via journal). Ebay also uses groups (each with their own forum), but has more aggressively been switching over to this Yahoo model now. Yahoo, specifically, has a group for almost everything. I used to belong to multiple Yahoo groups set for any specific publically traded stock (1 group per each stock), 'tho those particular groups were actually created by Yahoo, rather than end users. (End users also had thousands of their own, each group with their own forum, announcements, etc.). One common theme tends to be a forum for each group in all these scenarios, but the site itself also had it's own forum areas.

I've explored all the options, but they pretty much all revert back to the main thread topic. For a small business (like me), it's not cost effective to have to keep going back to custom development (particularly whenever DNN does a crucial upgrade, breaking custom code) (keeping in mind that this setup integrates throughout the site in many ways). Trust me, I was fully committed to Vivo at $500 a pop, until I saw that it was on its way out, and DNN/Active were on the way up. And there's absolutely no way to afford a complete write-up. It's different with a minor project, but a full social suite (or other complex, fully integrated product) would be very expensive.

I honestly don't need group level blog, wiki, announcements, & forum. They all serve a similar purpose, though it is doable, and would be great. But I do need a way to allow groups to permanently store and categorize their own "threads" (with appropriate moderation/group owner setting options), for which the journal isn't useful. Forums being the best option. Plus events, and search are essentials. Like I said, I'm sure DNN is aware of this functionality, and some of the "core" components are thinking in this direction (events). Active forums is one of them (though unfortunately that's not really "core" anymore). And, back to the main topic again, even if Active Forums does get totally fixed, and works great on groups... is it wise to integrate it if DNN is not using/supporting it directly (keeping in mind that each user group has it's own forum, so if Active stops being supported, it affects everything/everybody's group page not just the site's forums). Which is why I wish DNN would take on AF, or upgrade these forums to handle groups :)

Lastly, while I realize not everyone needs this, clearly DNN was aware of this as they did create the Groups functionality. It's already in place, in use, but only really makes use of the journal (and notifications, and moderater/group owner settings). So far, it's modeled after Facebook groups, but has the foundation in place both for the Yahoo setup and/or Facebook style A couple years ago, there was a lot of talk about this on various DNN related forums.

Honestly, IMO the reason the DNN social ecosystem is so poor, is because of the large (and ongoing) question marks that DNN created down this path a couple years ago, and the complexity of the solutions. (I mean, how long did it take before DNN fully dropped Active Forums). Social within core DNN is still young with the first baby steps example being DNN 6 (basics, Taxonomy, and maybe groups), then 7 finally actually making use of the tech with journals/notifications/groups/profiles. If I were a developer, I would definitely not have tried to compete at this stage on a suite type product, tho if I had an existing product (like news articles) I'd just recently start to take advantage of it (as of DNN7). Alternatively, there are small, specialized tools that can now be created (like bookmarking at the group level, etc.). I don't think it's lack of demand (as Vivo and Active and others existed for a very long time), but rather all the balls were still up in the air, and even now, who knows what else is in store (such as the things I've outlined). At least now, the foundation is just now clear (for 3rd party developers) - though the overall direction is still questionable.

Back on topic: A third party vendor going away is awful. But a third party vendor going away for a heavily integrated solution can be insurmountable - even if open sourced. This is a really big issue, so the more available in core, the better (for which I'm very grateful for group functionality foundation BTW). It's the nature of the thing of course, but a bit scary IMO.